Monday, September 20, 2010

You can record CV data to an audio track through the use of a CV to Audio converter (like the CV2Audio2CV) to then examine the CV waveform. This is useful when we need to debug or check the CV values being generated by a device.

The only problem with this, is that if we're on a long tweaking session, the CV recording (i.e. CV "log") may get pretty big unnecessarily. One solution is to go on a sequence of short recordings, while deleting the resulting Audio Track clips in between those sessions.

But now there's Reason 5 and it's new Sampling capabilities that we can use also for CV monitoring.

So, now, instead of recording to a track, we can just Sample the CV, again through the use of a CV to Audio conversion (wiring the audio output of Thor to the Sampling input at the back of the rack, making it the sampling source).

This allows us to keep an eye on the thumbnail Sampling scope window, while doing our CV tweaking and testing.

If closer inspection is needed, we can always edit that sampled waveform and check it more closely through the sample editor.

To get that Sampling scope running, you simply add any of the existing samplers, initialize it, press the Sampling button and let it run by itself while you work on the CV generation devices.

Don't worry about running out of memory because the continuous sampling session will only keep the last 30sec of sample data.

Speaking of CV recording and sampling, remember that you can, when useful, take advantage of that and keep that data to be played by a sampler (or an audio track in Record's case) and convert it back to CV, while playing with the sampler's OSC pitch (or Filter settings) will "mess" with the original CV data rate or quality of the values, this may indeed be a wanted effect, you only have to keep this in mind when unexpected CV data occur :)

Friday, September 3, 2010

(picture taken by yours truly, just minutes ago, at an undisclosed location)

I'm now a proud owner of a recently installed copy of

Reason 5 & Record 1.5.

Life is good :)

EDIT:

Why the picture? Well, it's just to show you how official this day is...

we're talking about flags'n'all kind'of official here ;)

EDIT2:

OH! I almost forgot ...and I'm now also a ReCycle 2.1 owner! :)

I've never been a loop-centric type of user. I still struggle with the notion of using "construction-kits" I see being sold in Loop/Sample/Sound Library/ReFill shops.

Coming from a composer-type background and not a DJing audio cut'n'paste type of producing music, I like to compose, program and play everything myself, so I usually use REX patterns (i.e. loops) just as test sources, draft vanilla starting points or as subtle added complement layers to my rhythm patterns.

I also like the instant rewarding live usage of pre-programmed dynamic playable step-sequencers and arpeggiators, but I cringe at the fact that I can't easily customize the "Insert" patterns of Reason's RPG-8 due to the reasons already stated.

So I'm very curious to see how am I going to fit ReCycle into my way of doing things while exploring its possibilities.

First planned use: Fix some badly sliced eastern voice based REX files I bought a while ago. Let's see how that goes... I would hope that those become usable for some ideas I have for a while now, since I'm hoping to use those in Dr.OctoRex for easy note/pitch changing, instead of going through fixed-pitch Record's Audio import route (that would solve just the tempo problem).

Neptune will also play an important role on some of the simpler dry voice "loops" as well, btw...

Monday, August 2, 2010

Imagine you're doing this incredible stereo multi-tap echo combinator patch, where you really need to allow the user to select a list of Left/Right ratio combinations. As an example, let's assume we need a list of ratios like this one here:

Left/Right

1/1

4/3

3/4

3/2

2/3

2/1

1/2

3/1

1/3

4/1

1/4

1/OFF

OFF/1

hmmm... so, to be able to go through such a list with a combinator rotary, you really need a "device" that enables you to Randomly Access an Array of CV values or states, don't you?

Well, thanks to Thor and the way the Step Sequencer has been implemented, we can have such a thing.

So... let's build it!

Just add to your combinator (the one needing that list of CV values selectable through a rotary) a Thor device and initialize it (this is where my set of "null" patches usually comes in handy, where there's a "null" patch for each device, to quickly start with "everything off" kind'of patch, not quite achievable with the "initialize" option. Something I'll include on my CV tools microReFill, btw).

Now, for this example, we need 2x13 values, so let's use Thor's Step Sequencer Curve 1 for the Left values and Curve 2 for the Right values, and set those up with those tiny little knobs :)

I usually light up the buttons with the wanted values, just to have a visual notion of the array range.

Ok, now for the real "magic" to happen, we need to set these on Thor's Step Sequencer:

Run Mode: Step

Direction: Reverse

Step Count: 1

Then, on the Combinator's Modulation Routing, add a Rotary as the source and target Thor's Step Sequencer Step Count. Set Min to 1 and (for this example) Max to 13 (because we only want to access 13 CV values).

Twist that Rotary and see how the yellow LED lights up the selected (step) values.

Now, try connecting some wires out of Thor's Curve 1 and Curve 2 CV outputs at the back to the CV input of the rest of the devices or if you need to control something without a CV input, you can always plug those wires into a couple of spare Combinator own Rotary CV inputs and use those to control any other value through Modulation Routing :)

The same is true if you need to access this list with a CV value. Just use the existing CV input of the ModRouted Rotary to control Thor's Step Count through CV.

...btw, on Reason 5 & Record 1.5, you'll be able to use the new extra CV inputs for this Modulation Routing, without giving up on any of the spare Rotaries! Checking the new features list, you'll see this:

The Combinator in Reason 5 is expanded with new CV inputs on the back. The four new CV inputs can be used to control any parameter on the contained devices, providing even more options and possibilities for sound designers.»

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

It would be really cool if we could change Thor Buttons state through CV triggering, wouldn't it ?

Ya know, if you need to toggle the on/off state of some CV out to be used on, let's say, a bank of 16 devices that react differently to the state of that CV ?

We can already toggle the state momentarily through a specified Note or through automation of those 2 buttons in Thor, or the 4 buttons in the Combinator, but a simple scalable solution for CV triggering a CV state would nice.

Well, since there's no way in Thor to send "CV in1 -> Button1" so a gate signal in CV 1 input would flip the state of Button 1, we have to come up with the next elegant solution available, using Thor's Step Sequencer :)

Fortunately, there's a "Gate In (Trig)" CV input at the back of Thor's Step Sequencer, so here's our CV input that will trigger the CV state toggle.

To achieve the toggle action, we need to set the Run mode to Step, so for each CV trigger, we get the next Step value(s), and since this is a toggler and not a step sequenced list of values or states (more on this below), we need to restrict the number of Steps to 2, to get the On/Off state values.

Then, we just have to select, for instance, the Curve 1 values and set Step 1 knob value to 0 (the Off state) and Step 2 knob value to whatever you need, usually 127 or any other useful value needed for the specific situation this would be used.

Simple uh? :)

So now, each time there's a CV trigger going through Thor's "Gate In (Trig)" CV input, the state or value available at Curve 1 output flips to either of the 2 available states.

Since there's also Curve 2, Note and Gate/Velocity outputs, 1 trigger can give us access to 4 simultaneous values.

As mentioned earlier, this is also true for the number of states or values for each trigger. I'm sure you already imagined that, besides a simple 2 state flip toggler, increasing the number of Steps will get us a CV triggered sequence of states and values.

At this stage, the direction of step increase is also an important setting in a CV Stepper, where, besides the simple Forward/Reverse direction, there's the Pendulum that could be useful, for instance, in a triple-state toggler, going through the middle state on each interaction.

The usefulness of something like these 2 solutions, the CV Toggle Switch and the CV Stepper might become more apparent on some future posts... ;)

Next: Since you already know how to do a tempo-dependent random CV access to a 3x32 cell array, my next quick CV tip will show you how to use Thor's Step Sequencer to get a tempo-independent CV RandomAccessArray of values, where a CV value can be used as an index to access any of the 4x16 cell array.

As you may already know, I've been accidentally collecting more MIDI Keyboard controllers than I ever wished for. Buying new, not selling the old because there's always an excuse use for it.

It all started when I bought my (really mine) first "real" (as opposed to my Sinclair ZX Spectrum) Personal Computer (I had used PCs for a while at this point: 8086, i286, i386sx, i386 based, but none were mine), a brand new D-I-Y i486DX2@66MHz based PC with (at the time) 4Mb (a few years after, upgraded to 32Mb) of RAM.

It had a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 because I've always hoped to use a PC to generate sound through synthesis using math (i.e. DSP algoritms), besides taking advantage of the digital sampling/playing capabilities that PCs started to have at the time, through these new, more capable, audio card interfaces.

I was all excited also because it included a true FM synthesis chip, the Yamaha OPL-3. This turned out to be a little disappointing, when soon realizing that it was too weak for any interesting, more elaborate and complex synthesis that I was hoping to do with it.

My plan was to buy a cheap, 2nd hand MIDI controller, and also take advantage of the MIDI-Game port cable adapter, and use that card as my FM synth, while learning more about how to program that card's sound DA chips to generate non-sampled based sound and build a CPU+RAM based synth instead of using hardware based synth chips for that.

Long story short, it was with that i486 that I discovered Trackers and the TraxScene underground culture, usually considered as a support scene for the more flashy and important DemoScene.

Well... because of Trackers, I basically stopped "wasting" my spare time, learning how to deal with audio card (DSP) programming and started using what was available to be as creative as I could with what was already available.

GUS had better performance with low CPU usage because of the built-in sample memory vs the SB cards that had no sample memory restrictions but taxed the CPU a lot because of sample data being transfered from the main memory. This was also why it was possible to send DSP generated audio instead of just sampled one... and to me, this was what kept the SoundBlaster way a lot more interesting than the GUS way.

I considered the SoundBlaster way (i.e. the notion of dynamically streaming the wave data to the card instead of statically pre-loading it) future-proof, knowing that the newer'n'faster CPU's were just around the corner... (thanks to Moore's Law)

Not having to pre-load the samples into the card's built-in memory was what made possible the soon to be known as soft-synthesis (exactly what I wanted to do with my SB16 from the start but didn't realize that it wasn't as easy as I thought... at least with pre-Pentium CPUs).

I forgot the name of that tracker... I think it saved MODs as .M8M or .M88 can't remember correctly, unfortunatly :( ...oh wait! I think it was .669 but still can't remember the name of that DOS tracker app *sigh*...

Edit: Found it!!! It was actually, the very first PC-based 8-channel tracker: Composer 669, by the demogroup Renaissance!!! ...which also brought us the extremely useful PMODE DOS Extender by the hand of Daredevil (Charles Scheffold) and Tran (Thomas Pytel) ...oh man... erm... I'm glad this stuff evolves fast ;)

...anywayx0rz...

The Internet was still miles away from happening to me, although I already knew about FTP servers and Telnet gateways into IRC channels, when reading some of the articles and even IRC logs (!?) that where published on DemoNews, Hornet's DemoScene-related text based (eZine like) newsletter I started reading at this time. I think it was also responsible for my sudden interest on Trackers and all the Scene. TraxWeekly became my main newsletter/eZine, since it was solely TraxScene oriented.

After understanding how a Tracker worked and how to use it, I searched for the best, most advanced one I could find that could run with my PC's SB16 audio card. Found Psi's Scream Tracker after downloading Future Crew's Unreal demo and becoming interested in that Demo group. Quickly changed to ST3 and started making .S3M mods, inspired by what Skaven, Purple Motion, and others were releasing at the time. I also tried Triton's Fast Tracker a bit later, but I was already hooked on the Scream's UI and shortcut commands, so... I kept using Scream Tracker until I tried its historic successor, Pulse's Impulse Tracker.

It was around this time that I finally saw this weird, very cheap, 4 octave mini-keyboard that had a true MIDI output plug at the back. It was perfect to use with IT's MIDI support. So I bought it and this allowed me to record more natural sounding (i.e. playing) sequences, recorded in real-time instead of step-sequenced.

...and this was how I got my first MIDI Controller Keyboard: Trust mini MIDI Keyboard. The same I still use with Record+Reason, through the Remote Codecs I released a while back, mainly for Dr.REX control, since it's not velocity-sensitive, it's still perfect for that.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Yup, more than a year was enough for me to figure that I had to release this as it is and don't bother to make a proper song demoing every little feature with the detail I wanted, nor making a .pdf document explaining the use and custom changes anyone could make to every device I had.

So... here it is "as is" and I hope those that kept requesting this either through mail, comments or YouTube messages can now enjoy this... finally! :)

Besides the Effect devices you see in the picture, you can also find in there 3 very small .rns songs that try to do some simple demoing of 3 of the devices. Nothing fancy, just some REX files with the device as an insert FX.

You'll find that ReGRAINZeR V.0.9 now allows you to engage a Fake Pitch-shift-like playable mode, by turning Rotary 3 full clockwise and using MIDI Keyboard notes C2 upward to "play" the audio source or any of the triggered live-grain loops. Don't forget that this Effects device needs a Sequencer track created for Keyboard control.

Also remember to try the Pitch and Mod wheels on all devices, especially on ReGRAINZeR's various modes.

FiltaPowa uses either an auto-trigger mode that uses the envelope of the audio source to control the envelope of the filter or a sequenced filter effect. There are plenty of sequenced patterns to try, although those are just examples, so you should make your own, of course.

GatorBox allows you to accomplish slow to fast tempo synced or unsynced gate (stutter) effects, giving you control of the Attack, Sustain and Release of the gate.

LoopBox is just that, a 4 slot audio sample'n'loop kinda effect, also usually known as a repeater.

Last but not least, to satisfy the curiosity of some that asked me about it too, I included the old ReGRAINZeR 0.2beta prototype featured in my first video demos, and also the 0.6.2beta included in the demo .rps file.

If you have any questions about these devices, please leave a comment here. I'll try to reply and do my best to explain or help to the best of my knowledge and spare time.

I hope you enjoy this little refill :)

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Update 1: I really have to mention this, after looking at Google Analytics today.

I have to thank all the readers that usually come here directly, through rss or Blogger subscription, even though the rate of posts isn't that frequent (one does what one can :).

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Update 2: Just uploaded K001FX V.1.0.1. Made some tiny improvements on the included .rns songs to show off some of the possibilities of GatoRboX when triggered externally. Also did some tiny fixes to the "song" showing off the ReGRAINZeR (nothing special) and... ah, added some automation to the FiltaPowa! song, to show also the pattern based filter triggering.

Finally, Reason Samplers deserve their name. They are now truly what their names have been implying for years... they are now real Samplers that can Sample :P

And being able to do live sampling during song play is even more awesome!

Imagine doing live beat-boxing with a running ReDrum, live sampling each channel while the patterns are running, adding up stacks of on-the-fly sampled noise/voice ? Nice eh? ;)

Add to that, live usage of Neptune's Voice Synth... pure bliss =)

(and now, Reason-only users can live-Vocode to boredom as well !!! ;)

The first time I saw Dr.Octo Rex I thought "meh... it's just a 8xDr.Rex... I already have that in a Combinator" but after knowing more about it (watch the video and read the specs!) I gained a new respect for this new device :)

Although I'm not a serious loop user, I must admit that the new Slice Reverse, Alternate Slice groups and that pretty cool Slice Edit Mode are very serious upgrades to Dr.Rex, besides the ability to easily alternate between 8 loaded REX loops.

Now, the thing that got me intrigued and excited at the same time was Blocks.

I used to compose a lot with a music tracker application, so I'm very used (forced to, at the time) to pattern composing a song. Reason's sequencer liberated me of that, where now I could finally compose and live record my MIDI performances without any rigid length constraints.

This new way of looking at Reason and Record sequencer, through Blocks, makes me go back in time, more or less... although, in truth, it'll make me go forward ;) because now we can mix both worlds, pattern composing with Blocks mixed with the existing Song tracks.

Some might say that Blocks is almost like track audio/midi clips, and that's true, but taken to the whole Song level, well above tracks. It'll allow the same vertical editing at song level that we have now at track level. Very cool and unexpected feature indeed! :)

Oh, and I almost forgot!!! TAP TEMPO!!! Did you see it ? There's Tap Tempo now, on the new Transport section. It's easily seen on some of the videos that glance over the Tempo section.

It's almost unbelievable how many requests and suggestions are being implemented in this release.

Ok, so... tomorrow the world will know about the 5th and last known hidden feature. Can't wait! :D

...and...

...maybe something will happen here too, 24 hours after we all know what's that 5th feature about ;)

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Well, for starters, Master Section got the missing "In" I was complaining about in my previous post :D

• Advanced MIDI Device: Master Section: In was not available as target

That's the good news, the bad news is that I forgot that using Advanced MIDI Device ports redirection to devices, bypasses the Remote layer (where all the conversion/mapping occurs), so... just setting Axiom faders to Channel 16 and redirecting it to the Master Section wasn't enough.

Anyway... all to say that, the workaround explained in my previous post, is still valid for the purpose I described.

But, it's good news that the missing "In" is now there where it should!

Now, the BIG news. IMHO, is:

• Import multiple audio files feature added

This, to me, was the most important "fix" (i.e. new feature) brought by Record 1.0.1

Record now can really shine as a mastering application, now that's so easy to import a bunch of audio tracks and put the SSL-like main mixer to good use :)

Other little things that I was waiting for:

• Record + Reason: changing step count in Thor sequencer should work with LED buttons

Reason users got surprised when trying to set Thor's step count just by clicking the respective LED and nothing happened in Record+Record :P

• Recording Latency Compensation made to work with manual monitoring OFF

This was also something that was needed, since it seamed logical to assume it already worked like this. ...and now it does :)

Thursday, March 11, 2010

All the new exciting and cool features one gets with Record 1.0 over Record 4.0 quickly became second nature as I made it my default music production application from the start.

I rarely use Reason 4 standalone now, and when I do, I'm quickly reminded of why using Record 1.0 is way better and more along the lines of what I've always wished for Reason in a long time.

I only go to Reason 4 now when I need to save something as a Reason file (as opposed to a .record file, impossible to share with Reason-only users) or quickly check something on a device, patch or browse a ReFill without having the hassle of going through the online authorization process of Record (or when I'm on an offline location) if I forgot to bring the Ignition Key (aka dongle) with me.

So it's only natural to say (and unfortunate to hear from the developer perspective, I'm sure) that it's easier for me (or any other user, I guess) to remember what's not implemented in Record simply because, the more I use it, the more I keep stumbling on the same missing features.

Friday, January 1, 2010

One of the bugs I reported during Record Beta testing, relates to a Master Section missing "In" target, when trying to redirect MIDI channel data to a specific device.

Why would I care about this tiny little forgotten thing?

Well, since I'm using an M-Audio Axiom 61, and don't find the fader section useful for Synth parameter tweaking (non motorized faders cause weird and sudden parameter value jumps and I find that distracting) I made my custom M-Audio Axiom Remote codec SysEx block (the bunch of data that gets sent to the recognized controller to set it up properly each time we start Record or Reason) have that fader section send its MIDI data to MIDI Channel 16.

This would allow me to "Channel Lock" the faders to the Master Section in Record, so I could easily control the Record's Main Mixer with those faders.

** A little explanation here: When I wrote this, I wasn't aware that the Advance MIDI Device bypasses Remote, so any MIDI sent to devices this way, is sent "raw" and isn't processed by the Remote layer, meaning, devices will only respond to Reason's "raw" MIDI Implementation (please check the "MIDI Implementation Chart.pdf" included in Reason's Documentation) and not to any Remote Map related to the controller in that port. Also, but this I knew already, this bypass includes the sequencer, so it's impossible to record anything sent this way to a device. This make sense, really, because it's like connecting a MIDI cable to your hardware synth, in this case, we're directly connecting the rack device to an external MIDI source.Since the rest of this post still provides useful information for other uses, I'm not editing anything. So... carry on and thank you for your time :) **

So, let me show you what I'm talking about with some nice fancy pics ^^

See how we can redirect MIDI Channel 1 data to a Mix Channel ?

This allows us to control its respective Main Mixer strip. The volume fader, and all those cool strip knobs :)

...or to a Combinator, besides being able to select one of the enclosed devices, of course.

Well, the Record 1.0 bug I'm talking about makes it impossible to use a specific MIDI Channel to control the Master Section:

See ? No "In" target for the Master Section :(

This would allow us to use a specific MIDI Channel to control all the existing Mixer strips at once. The default usually works in groups of 8 strips, because there's a Remote function to jump the control target to the next/previous 8 mixer strips. A very nice touch of the product specs designer(s).

As I said, I just had to find a workaround to this, and I did.

Since Record and Reason allows us to lock controllers to devices, I just had to make those Axiom faders look like a separate (virtual) controller. That's to say that, I had to make my Axiom look like 2 controllers instead of 1.

So "Axiom Standard" would present itself to Record like an Axiom minus the Faders type of controller and "Axiom Faders" would present itself like a 9xFaders controller, and this would finally allow me to lock that virtual "Axiom Faders" controller to the Main Section device :)

(btw, I did the same with the pads, creating an "Axiom Pads" virtual device, but... that's another long story, unfortunately, since there's no multi MIDI recording in either Record nor Reason, I wasn't able to record with those as an extra locked keyboard device).

How did I split my physical Axiom controller into 2 (or 3 with the pads) virtual controllers?

Using MIDI-OX filtered routing :]

This may look a bit confusing but it's very easy to explain.

As you can see, "USB Audio Device" (that's the Axiom) is sending a copy of the MIDI stream to "MIDI Yoke: 3" filtering out any Channel 16 data (becoming the virtual "Axiom Standard" without the Faders). See the filtering settings here:

(Double-clicking those grey squares get you this filtering pop-up.

The blue-dotted ones have filters set.)

Another copy of the same "USB Audio Device" MIDI stream is sent to "MIDI Yoke: 6" with all Channels but 16 filtered, becoming the virtual "Axiom Faders" controller:

With all this set, I just had to simply go to Record's Edit, Preferences, Keyboards and Control Surfaces and add an extra "faders" control surface receiving data from "MIDI Yoke: 6", not forgetting to set my usual Axiom codec to now receive data from "MIDI Yoke: 3"

...and that's it :)

Now, I can lock that "Axiom Faders" device to the Master Section (save that empty .record file as a Template) and take advantage of something I added to my custom codec: being able to use standard Bank MSB to make those next/previous base track jumps :)

I delayed this post as much as I could, waiting for a Record update that still hasn't come, unfortunately. One can only hope that Record 1.x comes soon and fixes this and other still existing bugs. Hopefully it'll also take care of some tiny annoying missing features, because Record and Record users deserve it!